1. Destroy the Village. 2. Save It.

Are we living in the golden age of digital media? It certainly looks that way to Ken Lerer. Venture capitalists like him have poured close to $100 million into digital content businesses since the beginning of 2013, by my calculations. Corporate investors have thrown in about the same amount, bolstered by the $70 million Rupert Murdoch put into Vice Media last August. Then there’s Pierre Omidyar’s down payment of $50 million on a bigger pledge of $250 million for his would-be new media chain, First Look Media, putting him in a class by himself. Add the numbers together, and you’ve got at least half a billion dollars announced just since the beginning of 2013. It all amounts to something of a gold rush—or a bubble, depending on your point of view.

Like his fellow VCs, Lerer has a few million reasons to be an optimist: His investment firm, which controls some $70 million, specializes in early media funding, and increasingly that means content as well as technology. Already, about one in five of Lerer Ventures’ 160 investments involves digital content; some of that is as newsy and highly trafficked as BuzzFeed and some as targeted as content marketing phenom NewsCred and travel-industry trade site Skift. The other 80 percent of his investments cover a vast range of would-be disruptors, from streaming music startup Songza to social tracker Newsle to “smart kitchen” site Orange Chef.

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What convinced him that journalism could be a business in these down-on-journalism times? Well, it helped that Lerer, a career PR guy best known in his previous life for “breast-feeding” tips to reporters in and around New York, a few years back hit the media jackpot of a lifetime. After making an early $2 million investment, Lerer and his partner Arianna Huffington built the Huffington Post into the fastest-growing news site of the aughts. Six years and 25 million unique monthly visitors later, it sold to AOL for $315 million—$65 million more than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos just paid for the venerable Washington Post.

But if anything, Lerer believes that his 2005 bet on HuffPo—intended as a liberal counterpoint to the conservative-leaning Drudge Report and built expressly to affect the 2008 elections—was “a little too early,” as he put it in a recent conversation. Since then, the share of American households with a broadband connection has soared to 78 percent, up from 28 percent in 2005. Back then, the iPhone didn’t even exist; now around 58 percent of Americans own a smartphone, and they spend an average of five hours per day reading, tweeting and sharing news, viral videos and yes, photos of their cats. That’s more time than they spend watching TV.

Seeing such numbers, digital guru Marc Andreessen laid down a marker recently. “The big opportunity for the news industry in the next five to 10 years is to increase its market size 100x AND drop prices 10X. Become larger and much more important in the process,” he exulted in what may well be the first-ever example of a media manifesto originally published as a series of tweets (which he expands on in this issue of Politico Magazine). Lerer responded with eight tweets of his own, summing up the reason for the gold rush: “Web build out is complete. Massive social feeds are the future for now. They all need content. Content is king again.”

So is it a gold rush, a case of selective amnesia or a true tipping point in the fortunes of the media business?

King indeed. What these venture capitalists believe is that, with the hard work of laying those digital pipes now behind us, there’s an enormous opportunity waiting for those who can figure out how to create an endless stream of content to flow through them. Lerer compares it to the content revolution he watched unfold in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cable television, at first little more than a punch line to the gatekeepers of the big three broadcast TV networks, had by this time built out its distribution pipes across the country. Soon, ABC, CBS and NBC were joined by dozens, then hundreds, of new channels. The need for content exploded. New channels—TNT, TBS, Bravo, National Geographic Channel and hundreds of others—flowed into the vacuum, satisfying niche audiences and generating billions of dollars in profits.

Today, cable TV is still a very good business to be in—the four biggest cable companies take in around $40 billion a year in video revenue alone, from about 40 million cable households. That’s a lot, even if the number is in slow decline, but it’s dwarfed by the scale of the Internet opportunity: There are already more than 86 million households in the United States with broadband Internet access. Add in connected cars and connected TV—to say nothing of the rest of the world—and the potential demand for content on the web is enormous. Much bigger than cable in its heyday. That’s what has guys like Lerer so excited. “Good investing is investing in the obvious,” he deadpans.

When VCs talk about content, of course, it’s important to remember they don’t necessarily mean journalism in the traditional sense. It’s no coincidence that the business Lerer seems most excited about is Thrillist, an image-heavy site run by his son Ben that posts bro-friendly listicles ranking nude beaches, sandwich shops and “boozy brunch” spots in key American cities—not exactly the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes.

Yet traditional journalism could be a major beneficiary of this new golden age. Just look at where all those venture millions are going.

Vox Media, which generated great buzz when it lured wonk-blogging phenom Ezra Klein and company away from the Washington Post to build a data-driven news analysis site, got a $40 million vote of confidence from Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures, Khosla Ventures and others last fall, atop some $40 million in earlier funding.